Google Drive to offer 5GB of online storage for free?

Google is expected to launch an online file storage service soon called Google Drive. Actually, Google was expected to launch it several years ago, but the project kept getting put on hold or canceled… until now. Maybe.

If this is the real deal, it looks like Google will be offering 5GB of storage space for free. Users can pay for additional storage if they need it.

The idea is that once you upload files to Google Drive you’ll be able to access them on a PC, smartphone, tablet, or any device with a supported web browser.

If you change a file on one computer, the changes will be synchronized across other computers.

Google already offers users more than 7GB of space for their email, 1GB for Google Docs, and 1GB for Picasa photos. If you use the Google Music service, you can also upload up to 20,000 songs to Google stream music to multiple devices.

Google Drive is apparently designed for everything else.

This will hardly be the first service to tackle online file storage and synchronization. Google will go head to head with similar services from Dropbox, Box, and SugarSync, just to name a few.

But by tying the service to your Google account, Google will make it easy for customers using its other products to start using Google Drive without even bothering to sign up for a new service… thus providing an easy-to-use solution while further locking customers into the Google ecosystem.

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